Politics of Marx as Non-sectarian Revolutionary Class Politics: An Interpretation in the Context of the 20th and 21st Centuries

Abstract This article is condensed from three chapters of my Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World (Haymarket, 2018) and from a longer article based on these chapters. It is based on a talk on Marx’s politics’ delivered at ‘A Bicentenary Conference: Karl Marx at 200’ at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario. Canada. I am thankful to the participants at this conference for their comments. Put simply, Marx’s politics is about class struggle for state power to build socialism, a society of popular democracy, by overthrowing capitalism. In this short article, I will explore different aspects of this single idea, from Marx’s political writings, as I interpret them, and I will do this schematically. This is the first part of the article. In the second part, I will extend my articulation and interpretation of Marx’s politics, and briefly and schematically, relate this to some aspects of the Leninist legacy. Needless to say, this article does not provide a detailed exposition of Marx’s or Marxist politics (for this, see Das, 2018a).